Mejoramiento y manejo de praderas naturalizadas

The discussions of what I have labelled the Delhi-Bronx comparison might give the impression that the spread of hip hop is conceived of by my participants as

unidirectional; as a spatio-temporal expansion with the trajectory: the Bronx > the rest of the world. However, MC Eucalips’s suggestion that aapke hindustan mein bhi hai tabla bol (in your Hindustan there is also tabla bol) points to the idea that tabla bol is also a legitimate genre of beatboxin that is already existent in India. Similarly, Pennycook and Mitchell (2009) present interviews with African and Aboriginal Australian hip hop artists, who conceive of hip hop not as something external to their cultural heritage, something that needs to be appropriated, but rather as something that is already there and theirs. They cite the indigenous Australian rapper Wire MC, who

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refers to himself as abo-digital: “Hip Hop is part of Aboriginal culture, I think it has always been local” (Wire MC quoted in Pennycook and Mitchell 2009: 30). Pennycook and Mitchell therefore conclude:

The point, then, is that it is not fruitful to pursue the true origins of Hip Hop, as if these could be found either in the villages of Africa or the ghettoes of North

America, but rather appreciate that once Hip Hop is taken up in a local context, the direction of appropriation starts to be reversed: No longer is this a cultural form that has been localized; now it is a local form that connects to several worlds: Australian Aboriginal Hip Hop does connect to African oral traditions but not as much as it connects to Australian Aboriginal practices. (Pennycook and Mitchell 2009: 35)

Drawing on the work of Mignolo, Pennycook and Mitchell, “are trying to get beyond common images whereby localization is merely the appropriation of the pre-existing global, in order to explore instead how these artists’ articulation of the coevalness of origins obliges us to spatialize time and think differently about the already local” (p. 27, original italics).

Ethnographic work on hip hop from Asia, Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, South America and non-African American North America, shows that global hip hop heads spatialise time by constructing pre-Bronx chronologies. In other words, the Global Hip Hop Nation does not have one single historicity but has to be understood as occupying several zones of historicity which are connected with each other through discursive wormholes like the Delhi-Bronx comparison. The traditional (‘historical’) view of global hip hop, spreading from the South Bronx in 1973 into the world after 1973, through films like Wild Style, through hip hop ambassadors like American soldiers deployed overseas, or more recently through the internet, must be questioned therefore with a turn towards historicity. Hip hop artists in the peripheries point out that hip hop, or cultural forms that are equivalent to hip hop, have existed in these

peripheries long before Kool DJ Herc first plugged in his soundsystem into a lamppost at a street corner in the Bronx, or long before Afrika Bambaataa returned to the Bronx from South Africa and founded the Universal Zulu Nation.

Alim (2009) in the introduction to Alim, Ibrahim and Pennycook’s (2009) volume Global Linguistic Flows describes these spatio-temporal complexities:

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As we enter the abo-digital age, many Black (and other) American hip hop heads and scholars alike are not aware that Hip Hop’s “origins” in what Murray Forman (commenting at the Stanford Hip Hop Archive in 2005) referred to as “the essential Bronx moment” are being challenged by Hip Hop practitioners and scholars around the globe. Many of the chapters in this volume, in fact, present alternative origins of “Hip Hop Culture,” with Pennycook and Mitchell, Androutsopoulos, Omoniyi, and Sarkar doing so most directly. The “original origin myth” (to use an oxymoron) has been told and retold numerous times (George, 1999; Toop, 1984/1999; Yasin, 1999, to name a few), but very rarely, if at all, with an explicit metanarrative of the immense cultural labor that Hip Hop heads engage in as they make a “culture” with a “history” and “traditions,” and of course, an “origin.” (Alim 2009: 7, original italics)

In this chapter I have examined such metanarratives of culture in the making. The metanarratives do not only legitimise the appropriation of cultural forms like language, artefacts, clothes and aesthetics and values and makes them meaningful for the here and now, they also normalise this appropriation by synchronising its chronologies through discursive wormhole travelling. Alim’s interpretation that hip hop heads around the world “challenge” hip hop’s traditional historiography and create “alternative origins” could therefore be supported in my data. “The essential Bronx moment” was, however, not completely erased. It was evoked and served as a terra comperationis for the

narrator’s localised contemporary moment, yet not without deforming it and denying its complexity.

The final narrative that will be discussed in this chapter speaks directly to such comparing and through this it also highlights hip hop’s alternative origins. Like MC Eucalips’s narrative, this narrative is taken from a public performance. And like MC Eucalips, the narrator is a transnational hip hop traveller: Seti X (a self-chosen stage name), an American-Panjabi Sikh rapper born and raised in California. At the time of this recording, Seti X travelled through India, exploring, for the first time, as he says before the extract begins, the Panjab, his “motherland.” Seti X had already been in India the year before I conducted my fieldwork and some of the local hip hop artists were eagerly awaiting his return. Others had reservations against his political and artistic influence in the subcontinent. No doubt, he was influential in the Indian hip hop scenes, not least because he produced several music videos that gave shout outs to Indian crews and talked about India as a cultural homeland of hip hop. Seti X’s networks across the

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North American continent and also in the UK, made many people in the west become aware of the Indian hip hop scene.

During his stay in North India in 2013, Seti X also came to Delhi to perform at Mayday, a Marxist bookshop cum café cum theatre in Shadipur in West Delhi (see map in Appendix IV). On the 1st of May 2013, Mayday celebrated mayday, or Labour Day, and invited artists, poets, actors, academics and activists to give speeches and perform in the shop. The audience at this event was a peculiar mix of approximately 80 people sharing the narrow spaces between the bookshelves of Mayday: Indian intellectuals and Marxists, a few celebrities, left-wing oriented westerners, and a bunch of young hip hop heads from Khirki, South Delhi, who accompanied me to the event and also performed together with Seti X, since he had worked with them also in the year before. Also at the event were MC Eucalips as well as Delhi Sultanate and Begum X, the lead vocalists of the Indian ska band The Skavengers, who all performed partly together with Seti X and the young artists from Khirki. This hip hop/ska session stood in contrast to the other performances in so far as these hip hop and ska performers seemed to feel they had to specifically legitimise their allegiance to the intellectual-critical milieu of the afternoon. Delhi Sultanate and Seti X both engaged in narratives about the origins of

ska/reggae/ragga and hip hop respectively and linked these origins to the struggle of the subalterns, the Dalits, the scheduled castes and tribes, the workers and the common people; topics that had been addressed throughout the afternoon and which were the obvious political concerns of Mayday.

Seti X, a then 24-year-old Sikh, with turban and beard, sporting a Zulu Nation necklace and a black shirt with several fists punching upwards and the caption “Protectors of Hip-Hop” printed on it, grabbed the microphone and stepped on the performance space right next to the shop’s coffee bar, which supplied the afternoon audience with deliciously smelling, fair-trade, espressos and latte macchiatos. Next to the performance space, visible to the audience, was a framed photograph of Karl Marx, acting as a kind of Bakhtinian superaddressee (Bakhtin 1986) of the afternoon. Seti X began to speak about his first ever visit to the Panjab, and how this made him realise how little he knows about “his own culture.” Yet, he also mentioned that “living outside of India” (in the USA) made him understand a lot about other cultures, especially hip hop culture, which he described as “the main culture that guides my spirit in this existence.” He then gave some shout outs to the organisers. Then, after a three second pause, Seti X’s voice changed, it became louder, slightly higher in frequency. This style shift marks a transition from performance to high performance, which involves several

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aspects of communicative focusing (Coupland 2007). The high-performative focusing is best recognised in the scriptedness of Seti X’s narrative. Unlike his previous narrative about his personal journeys to India, we now get a more de-contextualised narrative that adequates, compares quite literally, on a higher scale, hip hop’s five elements with India’s indigenous artistic and cultural practices.

Excerpt 5.10 {00:12-01:17}

01 (3.0) so hip hop is a culture. it has FIVE elements. emceein compares to the 02 poetry. deejayin compares to the drum. graffiti or street art compare to the 03 kalakari. the kalakar who puts the writing on the walls for everybody to see. no 04 (.) need for you to pay to go to a art gallery. the fourth element. the fourth is 05 breakdancing can be compared to the indigenous dance moves of our people. and 06 the FIFTH element of hip hop that has been lost in the modern-day context is 07 KNOWledge. when hip hop was founded as a culture (.) in nineteen seventy 08 three in the south bronx. afrika bambaataa kool herc and other pioneers. who also 09 have ancestry that come back to (.) this land as well. as well as africa. erm. you 10 know founded it with these five elements. hip is to know hop is to move. hip hop 11 is the movement of knowledge. what we see nowadays on the radio and

12 television about hip hop is not (.) the culture. it is the commodified corporate 13 version (.) of one of the elements of rap. that’s what we’re seeing on television 14 and stuff today. so just remember that hip hop is a culture. for the people. of the 15 people. by the people. so let me do some spoken word real quick and then i’ma 16 do a couple songs (.) with some beats. IS THAT OKAY WITH YA’LL? ((audience cheers and spoken word performance begins))

(Recording at Mayday, Delhi 2013)

This text fragment from line 1-13 is a histoire about hip hop culture, where the events seems to narrate themselves (Benveniste 1971a: 208). In lines 13-15, in the resolution and coda of the narrative, the narrator’s POV comes to the fore in a discours that directly addresses his audience in the here and now and positions the narrator on level 2 (so just remember…; IS THAT OKAY WITH YA’LL?). Within the histoire of lines 1-13, we can, however, recognise three brief instances of discours where the narrator’s POV intervenes and disrupts the past temporality of the histoire; lines 3-4: no (.) need for you to pay to go to a art gallery and lines 5-6: the FIFTH element of hip hop

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that has been lost in the modern-day context is KNOWledge. These two utterances evoke the present T0, implicitly in the first case by directly addressing the audience in

the interactive world (and perhaps also juxtaposing ‘modern’ art galleries and ‘ancient’ kalakari art) and explicitly in the second case: modern-day context.

These T0 instances, different from the T0 in the resolution (lines 13-15), are

constructed to de-authenticate present-day practices of popular media consumption and in turn authenticate old-school values. In lines 6-8 the narrator takes his audience back to the South Bronx in 1973, the chronotope in which hip hop was founded as a culture. The founders of hip hop culture and he mentions two famous ones by their name are then localised when Seti X says that they have ancestry in India (lines 8-9). However, the hesitation markers that surround this utterance (micro pause, erm, you know) and his repair right after (as well as africa) perhaps indicate that the narrator cannot be sure either that this information is correct or if the audience will understand the significance of what has been claimed. This hesitant localisation, however, is mended smoothly, formulaically, in lines 10-11 with a T-1 formula of what hip hop used to be and how it

related to cultural knowledge and social movements: hip is to know hop is to move. hip hop is the movement of knowledge. This formula circulates widely in the Global Hip Hop Nation, at least since the release of KRS-One’s (2007) influential song Hip Hop Lives, in which this formula (in a slightly different form though) was popularised and which I cited in the Glossary at the beginning of this thesis. Thus, Seti X’s formula can be considered what Roth-Gordon (2009) calls ‘conversational sampling’, a quoting of rap lyrics in spoken interaction.

The narrative is historically polyphonous because it jumps between times and places (1973, nowadays, modern-day context, south bronx, this land i.e. India), and evokes historicity through historical compressions (indigenous dance moves, kalakari,

ancestry). It juxtaposes the old and the contemporary. Importantly, the old is generally depicted as good and praiseworthy, whereas the contemporary is depicted as a corrupted version of an original cultural format (line 6; lines 11-13). Hip hop emerges as an NF that is made up of its elements (emceein, deejayin, graffiti, breakin, knowledge) that, while originating in the South Bronx of 1973, compare to Indian art forms that had been existing for centuries, if not millennia (poetry, drums, kalakar, indigenous dance). Remarkably, even the pioneers of hip hop (Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Herc and others) are chronotopically connected with India, when Seti X mentions that they have ancestry in India, as well as – as he presumably takes it to be widely known – in Africa. This synchronisation of biographies and historicities links the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993)

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to South Asia and opens up the possibility of regarding hip hop as a global anticolonial struggle of formerly oppressed people, a connective marginality (Osumare 2001).

In lines 10-13, hip hop’s deep historicity is then contrasted with the shallow historicity of contemporary mass media, which Seti X rejects as unauthentic. He reminds his audience that hip hop is a culture. for the people. of the people. by the people (lines 13-14), which echoes the general Marxist grassroots rhetoric of the afternoon. He then gets ready to perform his art, first spoken word then emceein on beats. He also passes the microphone on to Delhi Sultanate, Begum X and the Khirki b- boys to perform with him on stage. Later also MC Eucalips joins them and makes beats with his mouth on which Seti X and the others freestyle.